readline library not found

Dear List

I need to build a postgres on a linux machine that I don't have root access.

I built readline from source and installed it with prefix of /home/me/local

readline library are in /home/me/local/lib and headers files are in
/home/me/local/include/readline

After explicitly specfying these paths with --with-libs and
with-includes postgres configure is still choking
on readline.

To check that this should work, I disabled readline with
--without-readline and configure chokes at zlib not found.
So I install zlib from source at the same prefix. This time postgres
configure finishes and then successfully built.

reading config.log is not helpful

Now if this solution works for zlib why is it not working for readline?

thanks